Archive for February, 2011

In order to escape being forced into a politically and emotionally disastrous marriage, Princess Raisa flees her queendom and enrolls in Oden’s Ford, a school that caters neutrally to all of the Seven Realms, under an assumed name. Meanwhile, ex-thief Hanson Allister, having discovered that he is a wizard, also travels to Oden’s Ford to learn the magic he’ll need to protect the clans, the closest thing to a family he has left. When they meet, the attraction that sparked between them once before becomes a relationship, but conspiracy gathers around each of them, and they’ll be lucky to make it out of Oden’s Ford alive, let alone together.

One day in fifth grade when I’d exhausted all of the skinny, middle-grade books in our classroom library, my teacher handed me something much thicker, with a smaller font and harder words and a heavier subject matter. “Try this,” she said. It was Brian Jacques’s Mossflower.

I admit I struggled through the first half. There was a lot of plodding through deep snow, a lot of British dialects, a lot of long descriptive passages where not much happened – hard for a hyper kid to sit through. But the more I read, the more engaged I became, and the easier the reading went. It took me months to finish Mossflower. It took me days to finish the other four books in the series.

It’s shaping up to be a perfectly boring summer for Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha, until they find a strange coin on the sidewalk that grants wishes…sort of. The coin grants half wishes, so you must wish for twice as much as you want, lest you end up with half a talking cat or half a safe journey home. Figuring out how to double most wishes is simple, but when it comes to finding a happy ending for themselves and their mother, the siblings need something more than just a little arithmetic.